Anyone that "knows" they will completely overpower Ukraine apparently stopped paying attention to reality many years ago. They've been proven to be incapable of it.

They're /r/unexpected, so if they were to state one or the other I don't know if that could be trusted anyway.

I think we'll see a temporary "return to normalcy" after the protest finishes and most subs come back online. But come June 30 and the end of third-party apps, we'll see a bunch of users come back to Lemmy/Kbin again.

In a way, this seems like the best way of driving things. The protest has raised awareness and got a ton of development work going, and then there's going to be a respite giving instances time to prepare themselves for the second surge.

And I could easily flip the question around to OP. Why would Ukraine blow up their own dam, flooding their own territory and potentially crippling their own nuclear power plant? And making a counteroffensive across the Dnipro river that much harder?

It's not to deprive Crimea of water ahead of the counteroffensive, Crimea's reservoirs are full right now so they've got a year's worth in the tank. That's about the only possible benefit I can think of that Ukraine might have got out of this, and even if it were so it would be a trivial benefit compared to the costs. Crimea's water supply isn't going to make a difference to the actual fight that's about to happen there.

This is the number one source of reassurance I give people who object that Lemmy is "overrun by tankies." That was just the earliest niche community that happened to jump ship in this particular direction. Now, even at this early stage, Lemmy is being overrun by everyone else.

You really think Ukraine needs more justification for retaliation against Russia at this point?

The overall "pattern of the war" is that Russia took a bunch of Ukrainian territory early on, and then has spent the past year having its meat ground and losing big chunks of occupied territory back to the Ukrainians again. Bakhmut has been notable because it was an exception to this overall pattern. We may now be seeing the pattern reassert itself there, though.

It's not surprising, but IMO the shutdown is still worthwhile. It's shaking people loose to start looking for alternatives, and giving those alternatives opportunity to shake themselves down too. We're not quite ready for a Digg-style implosion yet. It may come more gradually this time.

Seems like this should be a high priority feature. I did try joining a different instance but at the time only lemmy.ml was functioning and accepting applications. Now that I have subscribed to a bunch of communities starting afresh would be a bit of a hassle.

Interesting. I'm actually not reacting as negatively as most of the other folks here seem to be, I feel like it's a "the more the merrier" situation. Much like how I'm not mad that Gmail is using the email protocol, for example, it's good that it can interact with all other email programs and servers out there.

On the one hand, this is going to cause terrible long-term damage and cost a fortune to repair.

On the other hand, the Russians wouldn't have done this if they thought they were going to be able to hold the occupied territories long-term. So it's kind of a good sign, I guess.

Be mindlessly propagandistic "communist." The countries they fawn over aren't even particularly communist, they're just authoritarian. Russia in particular is run by capitalist oligarchs.

It's just tiresome and pointless engaging with them.

I wish the AFU had the courage to not waste the lives of their soldiers and come to the negotiating table so that no more lives are senselessly wasted

What's to negotiate? Russia has seized Ukrainian territory. Ukraine wants it back. There's nothing for Ukraine to concede.

The only side "wasting" lives here is Russia, if they'd just go home the war would be over. Ukraine's not going to try seizing any Russian territory.

And even if it were true, there are other instances. The only reason I'm on lemmy.ml myself is because the one that was recommended to me first was offline when I tried it, I could move somewhere else if this turns out to be true.

Moderation will be important for porn communities, so perhaps just start out with some kind of "meta" community where you can discuss stuff about the instance itself. May be better than throwing down a bunch of communities and ending up "stuck" having to deal with them.

Of course, the people of the Donbas were just sitting there peacefully doing nothing when all of a sudden the Ukranians started shelling them. That was the start of the military action, silly me. Good thing all those vacationing Russian soldiers happened to be there a the time to defend them.

Even better is to post the text of paywalled articles so people without access can still read them.

Older audiences are more likely to dislike the new changes, though. They've been on Reddit for a long time and will be aware of how much better it used to be.

That is the common narrative among Americans and Redditors

And also reality. Or does Russia still secretly occupy Kherson and Kharkiv? Did they only pretend to launch a major mobilization of new troops and call up prisoners to fill the ranks?

The day-to-day changes of the control map are less clear, especially now that there's major operational security around the counteroffensive, but I'm speaking of the overall "pattern of the war" here.

Well that's not a good sign. I hope the potential flood of users brings a flood of devs along with it.